Cultivating education brand loyalty is a long game. Getting new students to come to your school is just the beginning. How are you working to make this critical marketing condition a reality?

The last thing we need to talk about in our discussion on the necessary marketing conditions you need to successfully build your education brand is education brand loyalty. I left this last in the series because it’s the hardest condition to create for two big reasons:

Virtual Reality, known as VR, is making a big splash in the world of marketing. It provides a platform to show your audience the very best of what you can offer – a big step up from merely being able to tell them about it. VR presents an opportunity to take your audience on a journey, allowing them to experience your school firsthand, from the comfort of their home. This is an incredibly valuable tool to reach parents, make a positive impression and urge them to make contact. The following four steps will get you on the right track to creating a successful inbound marketing strategy for VR within your school:

As a marketer, especially a school marketer, you probably find yourself acting as a brand guardian – someone who is charged with ensuring that the school stays true to itself and its brand.

This often means fielding questions from executive staff about the correct use of branding, logos, even the voice and language you use.

Your school brand goes beyond the logo or crest on the students’ uniforms. it is the set of values that differentiate you and your educational offerings from competitors. It involves the high-quality interactions that you have with stakeholders and, furthermore, the actions that you have put in place to delight them across all your marketing channels.

If marketing is all about making promises, then branding is about keeping them.

Amalgamating two established schools, each with its already established identity and vibrant school community presents a number of communication challenges, not least the potential for confusion and misinformation within the existing school communities. Here’s how St Mary MacKillop College tackled the challenge on how to build a new school brand.

A rebrand typically consists of a name, logo or logotype, typeface selections, colour selections and sometimes, a tagline. While not being the sum total of your brand, a rebrand has the power to influence — good or bad — how people perceive your school. For some established schools, a visual identity can represent a significant brand asset. So making the decision to change your visual identity or brand is a big decision and should not be treated lightly.

Here are two situations that indicate a rebrand will create real, enduring value:

Another year has passed by, and we now welcome another year that will be full of opportunities and challenges. School marketing will be more interesting than ever with the arrival of new students, introduction of new competitors, and formation of new policies.

School marketing will be more demanding – and rewarding – than ever. More and more parents and students will start to rely on online content for school information, and marketing technology will improve further due to trends spearheaded by social media. You need to be ready to address the needs of parents and students so that you may be able to upgrade your school’s reputation and marketing conversions. It may not sound easy, but with proper preparation of your school marketing system, you can get through this year more successful than ever.

It’s your first time to visit Tokyo, and you’re very excited to see the city and experience its interesting, peculiar culture. You’ve always wanted to view the skyline from the Tokyo Skytree and watch a sumo match at the Ryogouku Hall, but you can’t figure out their locations since the map you’re holding is written in Japanese. You ask a stranger to translate the text for you, and you find out that the map only features the best dining spots in the city. Frustrating, isn’t it?

Insights into the world of school marketing and communications, presented by Brad Entwistle and Andrew Sculthorpe. Brad and Scully discuss news that marketers are putting more time into using marketing technology then their actual marketing; the implications of Adstream’s advertising content management and distribution company, Dubsat; the discontinuation of Vine; how to manage your social media in a crisis; Buzzfeed’s recipe video series,
Tasty, and how it dominates its audience through the effective use of Facebook video; and the importance of applying insight to marketing decisions.